Richard Spencer is one of the Daily Telegraph's Middle East correspondents. Married with three children, he was previously news editor, and then China correspondent for six years. He is based in Cairo.

The heart of an 'evil' matter

Another report came and went this week about the Chinese government's practice of harvesting organs from executed prisoners for transplant with hardly a speck of take-up in the international press.

China's transplants for foreigners attractÂ periodic outrageÂ

The agencies reported the allegations dutifully – datelined Canada, where the report was issued – and then, from Beijing, the formal Foreign Ministry denial. And that was it.

Outside Canada, no newspaper seems to have picked up the story, The Daily Telegraph included. There is a simple reason for this, of course. The uncontroversial, and verifiable bits of the report are old hat: we all know that foreigners are coming in significant numbers to China for transplants, and paying a lot of money to hospitals, and that nearly all such transplants are from executed prisoners.

There is periodic outrage, and now the Chinese government promises something will be done about it. The bits that haven't been widely reported are based on testimony originally acquired from falun gong, the exercise and meditation group, or cult -depending on where you stand – which was banned in China by President Jiang Zemin in 1999 and pretty ruthlessly persecuted.

The trouble is, that while many foreign journalists sympathise with the plight of individual practitioners, they are suspicious of the group and in particular of some of their claims. Several of us, I know, looked into these falun gong claims when they first arose last year.

They alleged that there was an underground prison/hospital in Shenyang, northern China, where 6,000Â falun gong prisoners had been held prior to being killed en masse for their organs. I spoke to the Chinese journalist in exile – as he described himself – who took the story to falun gong.

Unfortunately, his evidence was very much hearsay. He had got to know doctors at the hospital, who told him of the transplants. But obviously he could not name the doctors. He had spoken to nurses who said that more supplies were going into the hospital than could possibly be needed – the quantities of which he used to calculate the numbers.

This did not seem very reliable evidence in the face of the unlikely nature of the allegation: that 6,000 people could just disappear without a trace, or even a name of any of them being given. China is in many ways a closed society, but not that closed.

The falun gong cause has been taken up, however, by David Kilgour, a former Canadian regional secretary of state, and David Matas, a lawyer, who have now issued two reports on the matter. In the first, they said there was evidence from phone calls and interviews that some of the allegations were true, though they could not affirm the 6,000 figure.

They reported on telephone conversations with military hospitals in which callers asked whether there were falun gong organs for sale, and told there were. The trouble with these stories is that they are still hearsay, and there are other explanations.

As I have described before, this whole organ transplant business is disgustingly commercialised, with doctors selling their services to international middlemen fairly shamelessly. And if the customer asks for a falun gong organ, why not say yes? (Buyers might not want a common criminal's, after all).

The second report recounts interviews with patients who have returned from having transplants in China, and the doctors who treat them. They said that at least 100 patients went from Canada alone every year, and the number was increasing. In one case, eight kidneys were tested before a Canadian being treated in Shanghai was given one which matched, with the admission it was from a prisoner.

Ultimately, I think we are all nervous about reporting these claims because we don't want to give publicity to the original allegation, which seems so far-fetched and unsubstantiated (and emerged suspiciously soon after reports by me and others once again drew attention to this issue).

Yet the most recent report highlights things which are undoubtedly true and important, and increasingly admitted by the Chinese government itself:- there is a substantial business in selling executed prisoners' organs- many of the consumers are foreigners- the organs are provided suspiciously quickly, indicating that either prematched prisoners are being executed to order or that there must at any time be a substantial pool to choose from- much of the work is being done by military hospitals, or in civilianhospitals by military surgeons- there is a total lack of transparency about everything to do with this issue: the numbers of people executed every year; their names; which have their organs removed; the documents in which they are supposed to havesigned their agreements; the numbers of falun gong prisoners incarcerated; their names, and sentences.

The military hospitals point is important, for reasons I have gone into before. All the talk about new ministry of health rules on this topic makes no difference since the PLA hospitals are not under the command of the ministry of health or subject to the rules. The Foreign Ministry spokesman's rejection of the report on Thursday should be treated sceptically for the same reason.

To quote AFP: "This is done very cautiously and we have strict laws and regulations that require the consent of the people themselves," foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said. "There are serious regulations in this regard." The government's previous denials of the whole issue were somewhat undercut when the ministry of health admitted a couple of months ago that the practice was widespread. Now the official position is that even if that is the case the approach is "cautious".

But remember: Miss Jiang speaks for the "government" in a strictly limited sense. The PLA reports directly to the Communist Party, and Hu Jintao. They PLA does not seem particularly cautious in this regard. The numbers given for organ transplants in China rarely make sense, or match up with the putative number of bodies, or anything else.

If the government here wants to re-establish its credentials in this area, that is one area to start with; and then it could work on the other transparency issues, even if it does not stop the practice outright, everywhere.

In the meantime, whatever the origins of its interest, the Canadian report's recommendations are hard to argue with:

- pharmaceutical firms should stop selling organ anti-rejection drugs to China- countries should post travel advisories warning that organs from China may have been harvested from unwilling donors- they should also stop offering follow-up care to patients - foreign doctors should cut ties with their Chinese counterparts suspected of taking part in these transplants.

It also recommends formally banning patients travelling abroad for transplants from forced donors, though, as they admit, that's difficult to implement. A conference in Guangzhou in November brought welcome pledges from Chinese doctors to deal with this issue. But we still await the new "international standard" guidelines that are supposed to be put in place, let alone any actual action.

I don't see any reason for delay on this issue: this is one area where pressure is not only political, but can financially affect the heart of what the report calls "a disgusting form of evil".